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jweese

96 karma · joined April 17, 2013

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jweese··on Generating shell scripts from haskell using a shell monad
Sadly, this monad can't stop you from doing dangerous stuff in the first place, like iterating over the output of ls:

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs

jweese··on The Genius of MIT's Football Team
School: Chicago; year: 1939; achievement: eliminated program.

We do take it as a point of pride. We also had the first Heisman winner ever.

jweese··on Let the Type System do the Work
That's why you want

    newtype Kilogram = Kilogram Double
which has no runtime overhead but does enforce the fact the Kilogram is a distinct type.
jweese··on Why I like Java

    perl -pe ""
jweese··on Source Code in TV and Films
Yup: http://meatfighter.com/superman3/part1/
jweese··on Show HN: This page will disappear in 10,000 views
I didn't know either. Per "man ab":

> ab - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool

jweese··on New York City Launches .nyc Domain Names
st.nyc - Santa's homepage.
jweese··on Supreme Court: Natural Isolated DNA Not Patentable, Synthetic DNA Is [pdf]
I believe they just have a patent on these particular cDNA types, namely cDNA created from BRCA1 or BRCA2, and not on the well-known lab techniques for creating them.
jweese··on Supreme Court: Natural Isolated DNA Not Patentable, Synthetic DNA Is [pdf]
Justice Scalia's concurrence, reproduced here in full:

"I join the judgment of the Court, and all of its opinion except Part I–A and some portions of the rest of the opinion going into fine details of molecular biology. I am unable to affirm those details on my own knowledge or even my own belief. It suffices for me to affirm, having studied the opinions below and the expert briefs presented here, that the portion of DNA isolated from its natural state sought to be patented is identical to that portion of the DNA in its natural state; and that complementary DNA (cDNA) is a synthetic creation not normally present in nature."

jweese··on Replacing Clever Code with Unremarkable Code in Go
> The channel is the analog to the Unix shell’s | character.

This sentence was italicized, and rightfully so. I've written a few small Go programs, but I haven't run into a problem where I thought, "A channel is definitely the right solution here." Yet I love and feel quite comfortable with shuffling data through big shell pipelines. Perhaps I'll think of a channel next time I'm reaching for a pipeline.

jweese··on Jokes That Every Mathematician Finds Absolutely Hilarious
What's yellow, normed, and complete? A bananach space!
jweese··on An Efficient Way to Extract the Main Topics from a Sentence
Yes. For example, consider interlingual machine translation. Most systems today (like Google) use statistical MT that learns patterns from millions of examples. In interlingua, by contrast, you analyze the input sentence to form a language-independent representation of the sentence's meaning. Then you use that representation to generate a sentence in a new language.

As you might expect, this is basically impossible for wide-domain MT because we don't have unambiguous representations of the meaning of every sentence, and we don't necessarily know how to combine them, and there's a lot of non-compositional phrases, and on and on.

However, if we restrict ourselves to one small domain, interlingua can work. For example, the KANT system [1] is an interlingua that is built for translating technical manuals for Caterpillar products (bulldozers and so on). The input has to be written in a restricted subset of English (Caterpillar Technical English), but then you can analyze it exactly with hand-written rules, and produce exact output in the target language.

[1] http://www2.lti.cs.cmu.edu/Research/Kant/

jweese··on An Efficient Way to Extract the Main Topics from a Sentence
Except in passive constructions, but maybe that's an easy case to detect.
jweese··on An Efficient Way to Extract the Main Topics from a Sentence
Nice writeup. A few comments:

So you're just identifying NPs and VPs in a sentence? So lets say I run your program, and I get NPs "Instagram" and "Facebook", and the VP "acquired." The question is, who did what to whom? Did Facebook acquire Instagram, or did Instagram acquire Facebook?

Second, I think you're way over-emphasizing the supposed slowness of CFG parsing. Yes, the complexity is O(n^3) in the length of the sentence, but in practice, n is usually small. Modern statistical PCFG parsers are fast.

jweese··on Show HN: Needed Ideas for things to build, so I built this
Everyone's talking about auth to limit spam, but I think a more interesting approach is to let people click to flag spam, then train up a little naive Bayes classifier.
jweese··on Judge Wright issues Prenda Law order
I'm not a lawyer, but I am from the US. The Judge's order includes the following footnote:

"Even if their refusal was based on the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, the Court still may draw adverse inferences against them in this civil proceeding. Baxter v. Palmigiano, 425 U.S. 308, 318 (1976)"

The way I read it (again, not a lawyer) is that you can't convict someone based on their refusal to testify, but this isn't a criminal proceeding. In civil matters the rules are different.

jweese··on Google Now on your iPhone and iPad
> A browser plugin to enable/disable Now tracking seems like it could be handy, however.

I've gotten into the habit of using incognito mode for most searches, and only staying logged in for things I think I'll want Now-based information for, like directions or information cards.

jweese··on Google Now on your iPhone and iPad
Things I use every day: weather; baseball and football scores for teams I like; approximate time to home and traffic conditions from wherever I am

Things I use when the appropriate email arrives in my inbox: current flight schedules (plus approximate time to get to the airport); package tracking

One thing that totally surprised me: I had a reservation on OpenTable, and my phone buzzed with a notification that it was time to leave for the restaurant if I intended to make it on time

And to be honest, I haven't "done" anything to get this value. This is all information that arrives automatically. That is, Google determined automatically what I needed to know by indexing my email, my searches, and knowing where I am at all times. Make of that what you will.

jweese··on What Makes Code Hard to Understand?
My experience is the same. I work in NLP, and I've found that at least everything administered by ACL (probably our largest professional organization) is pretty much always available.